Antonio Gisbert Galvany

Antonio Gisbert Galvany was born in 1951 in Alcoy, a small town in the south-east of Spain, near Alicante, the capital city of southernmost province in the Valencia region.

Antonio Gisbert Galvany works
at a tempera wall painting reproducing
a bas relief from the Parthenon.

Antonio Gisbert Galvany in Bilbao, Spain
goofiing out with a friend and a
Woody Allen statue

Click the pictures above to see larger images

Since he was a little boy, he loved to draw and, when he was a little older enrolled for a few years at the local Art School taking classes in both design and painting.

He started working at a very young age at a local private radio. One of the radio owners, who also ran an advertising agency and asked Antonio to create art for specific ads from time to time.

As a young adult he moved to Paris, France where he lived for a few years and enrolled for several months at Paris University, which was then located nearby the castle of Vincennes, on the outskirt of Paris, where he took classes in Plastic Art. This experience, in addition to the many great works from world famous painters that he was able to appreciate and study at length during long, repeated visits at the Louvre museum, contributed to furthering his passion for design, drawing and painting.

When he returned to Spain he accepted a full time position as an illustrator with the advertising agency for which he had done occasional work in the past. In particular he produced a large number of storyboards for a variety of advertising videos and short films.

He then moved to Bologna, the capital city of the Italian region of Emila-Romagna in 1975. He married his Italian wife there and had two daughters. In Bologna he continued to pursue his career as a graphic designer working for various top advertising agencies there, thus continuing to develop his painting technique and fulfilling his other passion besides illustration and graphic arts.

At first he painted mostly using tempera colors, a technique that he felt very confident with, and perfected his skill in reproducing the work of classic painters as well as tempera wall painting reproducing historic reperts, as in the images to the right, where he has reproduced a the bas relief from the Parthenon, the ancient Greck temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, whom the people of Athens considered their patron.

In time, Antonio Gisbert Galvany started experimenting more and more with acrylic painting, so much so that this is the form of painting that he favors most to this day. He likes in particular the fact that with acrylics he is able to reproduce more closely the color effects that famous painters obtained with oil painting in the past.

More recently he accepted a position as teacher at a prestigious Liceo (high school) in Bologna. He also gives lessons about the most used softwares in the graphic sector, Photoshop, In Design, Illustrator at an Apple store in Bologna.

Falsi d'Autore, or 'Signed Art Reproductions', is the first and foremost is the . In fact, this represent the wider body of works by Antonio, and includes tempera and acrylic reproduction of classic oil paintings by the European masters between the 1500s and the 1900s. Most reproductions are made on commission, but there are also paintings he made for himself, family, or friends for the simple pleasure of it.

The second section, which I would like to call Muri d'Autore, an Italian play on words where the word Muri (Walls) substitutes the word Falsi (Fake) in the Italian definition of 'Signed Art Reproductions'. This seaction features reproduction of bas relief, original paintings, or a mix of original and reproduced art.

The final section is Portraits, and features original work, sometimes with back ground borrowed from classic paintings.

"David with the Head of Goliath"
(Davide con la testa di Golia, 1607)
Original painting by CaravaggioKunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Tempera wall painting of a bas relieve from the Parthenon, the ancient Greeck temple dedicated
to the Goddess Athena